John Lanchester most obviously (and brilliantly)
I think Sarah Waters too although obviously she veers a bit more to the gothic - Willkie Collins and Miss Braddon.

I'm not very good on music but I'm breathless with admiration that you played the Artful Dodger. The 1970s me was in love with Jack Wilde who of course played the Dodger in Bart's film and then went on to play Charley Hexam in the 1976 Peter Hammond BBC versions. RIP.

Yes I've seen that too and it was shocking to have it set out quite so starkly. I'll have to read it again and think about it some more.

Just a quick response here about CD and prostitution. Yes, he helped Baroness Burdett-Coutts run a home/hostel for girls who had 'fallen' into sex work but who were deemed to be capable of returning to 'good' society. At the same time he was relaxed about the fact that his sons might have visited prostitutes. Quite hard, I'd have thought, to square that away, but it points to his extraordinary sense of being able to occupy multiple points of view.

Yes I loved that one. I also liked the 2005 Bleak House. To underscore the idea that Dickens was really a modern kind of writer who would have been happy writing for EastEnders, Andrew Davies wrote the series as 15 half hour episodes. It sounds gimmicky but actually it worked very well.

The best OMF adaptation I think is not the one with Stephen Mackintosh and Keeley Hawes but the 1976 one with Leo McKern as Boffin, Alfie Bass as Wegg and Polly James as Jenny Wren. A bit stagey and creaky now but the talent involved was just extraordinary...

Yes, except I can't help thinking that 'antheap' is more productive-sounding than 'dustheap'. The dustheaps are refuse, the leavings of a society that has become fixated on making things - all those shiny objects that are found in the Veneering's home. They represent a sort of environmental wound. They're also, I think, related to the idea of 'everything returning to dust' - that sense that all Empires will crumble. Finally, 'dust' was often used as a euphemism for human excrement, so I think there's a sense that all those poor dust workers who sift the dust looking for things that they might be able to sell for a few pennies are actually sifting through human waste.

I'm sure it's intentional. Right at the beginning of the novel Boffin thinks the book is actually 'The Decline of the Russian Empire' before being corrected by Wegg. The point is I think that it doesn't matter which Empire we're talking about - Russian, Roman or British - they will all decline and collapse. And what Dickens shows us is London, the centre of the British Empire, already fraying around the edges. The dust mounds are a symbol of the waste and desolation that comes from all that energetic money making which, in turn, is predicated on the River Thames which connects Britain to the rest of the world. A world that it must dominate and despoil.

Very interest thread here. I agree that I think Harmon/Rokesmith/Hanford is probably the most obvious 'Mutual Friend'. But the brilliant thing about the title, as someone said earlier, is that it could apply to multiple characters, all of whom pop up in different social localities, linking people and places that would otherwise lie far apart. Take 'Twemlow' who is a brilliant major minor character, if you see what I mean. No-one really knows who he is (apart from being second cousin to a peer of the realm) but somehow everyone claims him as a friend. He seems like a cypher until, at the end of the book, he finally reveals himself to be a man of some character.

I don't know of any alternative titles. I think the use of 'mutual' was probably very much intended by CD. It was a word that was often part of the title of early savings banks/working men's insurance clubs etc. It implies that finance can be something shared, something communal. Whereas the evidence of the novel is that finance, money, capitalism keeps people as atomised individuals, all competing with one another.

My favourite classic biography is James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson. Brilliant evocation of the 18th Century. My favourite contemporary biography is Hermione Lee on Virginia Woolf - a brilliant example of matching the biographical form to a subject who was herself a constant experimenter with form.

I think Peter Brown's Augustine is excellent and still stands up very well indeed.

Great questions.
1. I have never found any evidence that Jenny Wren - a brilliant character - was based on a real person. People have come up with a real-life model for Mr Venus the taxidermist and there's long been a suggestion that Gaffer Hexam and Betty - don't put me in the Workhouse - Higden are based on 'characters' that Henry Mayhew interviews in the 1840s for his London Labour and the London Poor.

What's so fascinating about Jenny is that she's a caricature but she's also real. She's clearly an abused child who, as a result of inadequate parenting, can't order the world in a way that we recognise. She thinks dolls are people and people are dolls. And her relationship with her alcoholic father is heart-breaking. If you compare her with Tiny Tim,whom CD wrote much earlier in his career - another disabled child with preternatural insight - she seems so rich and real.

2. I agree it's hard to get through the baby talk that Bella and her dad go in for without gagging. It's not just 'sentimental' but borders to a modern reading on the incestuous. Actually a lot of literary critics by this stage in CD's career were causing him of being 'gushing and maudlin', so I think it would be a mistake to assume that contemporaries didn't feel a bit queasy. One way of dealing with our own discomfort is perhaps to place the icky qualities of Bella and her father alongside those of Jenny and Mr Dolls. These are actually parallel examples of teenage girls who've been badly let down by their fathers and are trying to find a way through.

3. Yes, CD was burned out by this point. While writing OMF he was involved in the Staplehurst train accident and not only almost lost his novel but was unmasked as an adulterer. He was travelling with Nelly on the train, which crashed killing many passengers. He left some chapters of OMF on the train and had to climb back into the mangled carriage to retrieve them. He was terrified than an eagle-eyed journalist would spot that he was travelling with a lady who wasn't his wife. Apparently his physical and mental health was never the same after that.

Yes he did! But name me a Victorian novelist who didn't. Just think of Jane Eyre, who goes wandering on the moors and 'just happens' to stumble across the cottage of some cousins she didn't know she had. Or try Middlemarch where everyone turns out to be the cousin of someone else's second wife. My point is that I think it's a function of the difficulty of writing a 'realist' novel - there's just no way of 'showing' rather than 'telling' that everyone is connected.

Well Uncle Jasper did it I'm sure, but the idea of working out how CD would have brought the plot neatly to an end is beyond me.

This is a really interest conversation. I completely agree with the idea that Dickens responded to the earlier criticisms of Fagin. He was stung by Mrs Davis' comments (in part this was doubtless because he was a people pleaser and found it hard to be challenged) and he did try to do better with Riah. I think he makes it completely clear that the dastardly Fledgeby mobilises anti-semitic stereotypes in order to have everyone think that Riah is a 'grasping Jew' when, in fact, it is Fledgeby (a gentile) who is the greedy one. And I also note that Dickens makes Rev Milvey, the obvious representative of the Christian faith, into a rapacious man who is doing a brisk warehouse business in orphans - it's one of the funniest sections in the book I think.